How could you get answers from Google faster than searching? Add Google's new Talk Guru to your Google Talk contacts, then ping him/her/it with your questions about the weather in Dallas, what $5 in Romanian leu equals in U.S. dollars, and translating words between many languages.

Add guru@googlelabs.com to your contact list, send a chat invitation, then "ask" it questions. It seems to support the same kind of quick queries that Google SMS supports, and gets back to you very quickly. It works through most chat clients, too, so if you can send a chat quicker than you can pull up your browser or Google.com, it's just a tiny bit faster and more helpful.